Hi and welcome back yet again to THT’s series on starting pitcher leverage. This is the paragraph those of you familiar with the series can skip. (Actually, you can skip the next one, too). For the rest of you: Starting pitcher leverage is when a team intentionally uses a pitcher against a rival club. In modern times, with a firmly regimented five-man rotation, it no longer exists, but it was common from the Gilded Age until the 1960s. For example, long time fans can recall how Casey Stengel intentionally started Whitey Ford as often as possible against the Yankees’ main rivals, the White Sox and Indians.

After looking at starters with the best and worst careers, single seasons, figuring out how much impact leveraging had on hurlers’ runs allowed, and answering one critic of this project, the most recent article focused on platoon leveraging. As the term implies, platoon leveraging existed when managers used their lefties against the most left-leaning lineups, or righties against the appropriate offenses. The firsttwo articles on leveraging revealed that platoon leveraging was a crucial component in this phenomenon. To quantify this specific type of leveraging, I invented a stat, L#. Scroll to the very bottom of this article for a full description of it. Briefly, L# investigates how southpaws were used against a team, not by a team. A score of 100 means the team saw as many lefties as it should have, higher means it saw lefties more often, and lower indicates it saw less them often.

Last article, I showed only the highest L#s ever. In this one I’ll give you the 20 lowest. Then, since there’s no point just sitting on this info, the heart of this article will be a data dump: I’ll provide the L# for every team from 1892-1969 except (for reasons discussed last article) the Federal League.

Lowest L#s Ever

These are the teams that saw far fewer lefties than they should have. As mentioned in the previous article, none of this is based on a complete sample size. It looks only at lefties for whom I computed Average Opponent Winning Percentage, but since I AOWPd two-thirds of all starts from 1876-1969, that’s a large enough body to produce conclusions.

Duke Snider had to wait several years to get into the Hall of Fame because the writers thought he unduly benefited from the lineup around him. As the only dangerous lefty in a very dangerous lineup, he almost never had to face hurlers at a platoon disadvantage. (Look back up at the list.) Score one for the writers. Here are the Dodgers’ L#s from 1950-1962:

Teams were a little slow pulling their lefties against the Dodgers. Dem Bums led the league in runs scoring in 1950 with only a young Snider and an injured Gene Hermanski swinging from the reverse side of the plate. Brooklyn traded Hermanski in mid-’51, leading to the first big downward step. As for their second, and more historic, drop between 1954/55, it’s a bit stranger. The Dodgers essentially had the same lineup in ’55 as they had in ’54. Actually, they added a lefty with the offensive middling Sandy Amoros. So why the heck the giant downturn?

My hunch is that the secret rests in the first month of 1955. Anyone over the age of 30 reading this can recall how the 1984 Tigers wrapped up the pennant race in April by spurting out to a 25-5 start. Brooklyn mocks those puny Tigers. The Dodgers began the year 22-2. They scored at least six runs in 15 of those games. Heck, even when they lost their third game, they scored eight runs. The rest of the league couldn’t help but notice how fearsome this unit really was.

The Dodgers already had been a team you hid your lefties from, but this brought the intensity up. NL managers quickly developed a mantra: Put a southpaw on the mound on Ebbets Field only when you’re the beneficiary of the pitcher’s life insurance policy. Strangely, the only time Brooklyn saw a lefty in that opening stretch, it lost. No foolin’. Oh sure, the Dodgers still scored 10 runs that game . . .

Aside from the Boys of Summer, the McKechnie Reds from the 1940s also dominate the list. They won back-to-back pennants in 1939-40 so even though they weren’t known for their batting, teams looked for an extra edge. The Reds had no dangerous lefthanded hitters. More importantly, they had a great park for righthanded pitchers. The fence in right field was 50 feet farther than the one in left.

Crosley Field really was the key. The Reds make up one-third of the above list. Cincinnati was so inhospitable to lefties you’d think it was one big conclave for the John Birch Society. Even Crosley Field’s predecessor had a deep right field. From 1892-1946, the Reds had an average L# of 76. That’s incredibly low for a half-century. Then they reconfigured the stadium, and in 1948 had a mark of 147.

Also, the 1947-9 Pirates three-peated on the list. Unlike the other teams, these guys sucked. But they made the mistake of going with an entirely righthanded lineup in 1947. They also moved in the left field fence by 30 feet that year. Next year they picked up a couple of lefthanded southerners from Branch Rickey’s squad— 37-year-old Dixie Walker and 23-year-old Ed Stearns, but it didn’t change things much. Pitt benched both in 1949, but traded for Johnny Hopp mid-season. The Pirates retained really low L#s until 1952-3, when they were so pathetic there was no reason to play them for the edge.

Highs and Lows

So when was platoon leveraging the most common and when was it the least common? That’s a fun one. There’s a simple way to figure it: Find the difference from 100 for every L#, add those together, and divide by total number of teams. Here are the 10 biggest years for platoon leveraging:

I threw in the 11th best to show that 1908-1910 are all up there. There’s a little of a lot of different eras here. The late 1930s and early 1940s show up the most. 1937 is 12th and 1939 comes right after it.

Lotta teams from the 1960s. Sure, as pitching became more standardized in general, you saw less leveraging. Makes sense. By 1969, the only way platoon leveraging survived was that teams kept lefties out of Fenway and put them in Yankee Stadium. There also are years around 1920 in there. Offensive platooning reached its zenith then, dissipating the need for pitcher platooning.

Data Dump

A few comments. Some of this might make more sense at the end of the list, but it’s going to be so long that most readers won’t scan down and read any bits on the far side of the moon. Again, none of this is based on a full sample size. I’ll list each team by what town it usually played in. The Browns/Orioles will be in the “StB” column. Exception: Minnesota. Calling that franchise Washington would be confusing because another Washington shows up in the AL in the 1960s.

Take notice, baseball. Few things endure just as they've always been, casual pursuits least of all.

One key note: In the late 1960s, the sample size becomes a smaller percentage. I AOWPd pitchers with at least 150 GS (or 85 win shares) from 1876-1969. Now that means everyone with 150 starts in his career through 1960 got listed, but some guys were only partway through their careers in 1969, and still shy of the cutoffs, but later reached them. Result: The numbers for those years are a little shakier. Getting a score of 120 is easier because as the sample size goes down, it means a team saw 25 lefties instead of 20, which can be explained largely by random variation. The fact that teams had trouble scoring that high by the late 1960s is a telling sign of how little platoon leveraging occurred.

First I’ll give the first league with a notable number of lefties, the AA from 1885-1891. Then I’ll give the NL from 1892-1969, and finally the AL from its inception until 1969. To keep it as manageable-sized as possible, I’ll put the 1960s expansion teams in the same columns as the four 1890s liquidated teams. I’ll just put new headers in as needed. Since the late AA had so many collapsing teams, I’ll just tell you now the L# for their half-dozen one-year wonder franchises. In 1890, Rochester, Syracuse and Toledo score 92, 110 and 86 respectively. Next year Boston, Milwaukee and Washington earned 86, 82 and 118 L#s.

On the left just next to the year, I’m including the total number of GS by LHP in the study, so you know how large the sample size is each time. Here’s the AA:

So much for that. Next time, I’ll look at a subject of considerableinteresttome: managers and leveraging. Who did the most and who (prior to the 1960s) did the least?

References & ResourcesWhat the heck is L#?: It’s a stat that tells you if a team faced as many lefthanded starting pitchers as it would have if all southpaws were used evenly against opposing teams. The numerator is the number of starts by LHP against a given team. The denominator is how many starts southpaws should’ve had if they’d been used evenly. Divide it out, multiply by 100, and round to the nearest integer. That’s L#. One key snag: it’s not based on all LHP starts, but only on those pitchers I’ve looked at for this entire series on leveraging. Then again, those 659 pitchers combined for more than two-thirds of all starts from 1876-1969, so I feel pretty confident that these L#s, while imperfect, are generally accurate. For a more detailed account of how I calculated L#, read this article.